Shutdown and Debt Ceiling

At 1149 EDT people are optimistic there is some sort of deal coming that will push the next crisis into the winter with no, or no serious, concessions to the hostage takers.

Anyway, none yet.

I have the impression part of the deal, however, is an agreement to talk about spending reduction.

And that is already a concession, and an important one, when you consider they should be talking about significant tax hikes and spending increases aimed at getting people back to work.

No, the Democrats did not force the Republicans to abolish the debt limit and re-open the government for good.

The Republicans still do not accept that extortion by closing the government and threatening default along with the national and perhaps global economic disaster likely to result is not acceptable.

The plea that "they have no alternative" because, as they only control one house in a bicameral legislature and do not control the White House, they cannot get what they want by getting bills passed and made into law in the constitutionally prescribed manner, is simply not acceptable.

"We have no alternative" is no more acceptable when Republicans target America than when terrorists do it, or when people on that argument start a civil war.

And yet that very plea was made only yesterday in those very words by Pat Buchanan, and it has been made for weeks not only by the more radical Republican legislators but by their leadership in the house, many of them in the senate, and nearly all of the names big and small of the right wing noise machine.

In all these weeks of struggle, leading movement conservatives who have been around forever, since Nixon, since Reagan, and some even since Goldwater, stood solidly in support of the most radical of tea-bag Republicans in the house and the senate.

Nobody  is apologizing.

This is not the first time these faux conservatives, who are actually right wing revolutionaries who want to destroy the modestly social democratic and secularist America that has grown up in the last century, have threatened to wreck America to get their way.

It won't be the last.

Heck, as it isn't a done deal until both houses agree and the president signs on, the current episode may not even be over.

Update.

The senate was supposed to announce step 1 of the deal at noon. It's 12:08. No announcement.